Someone I know is writing a little script to parse a PIX fiewall log, grab elements from each line, and insert said elements into a database. Here's a sample of the data: 
conduit permit tcp host 192.168.1.1 eq www any (hitcnt=57476) 
conduit permit tcp host 192.168.1.1 eq 139 host 192.168.2.1 (hitcnt=2)

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What he wants to end up with is: 
conduit permit tcp|host|192.168.1.1|eq|www|any|(hitcnt=57476)
conduit permit tcp|host|192.168.1.1|eq|139|host|192.168.2.1|(hitcnt=2)

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Forget about writing to the database, for now. The more immediate problem is getting the program to "create" variables on the fly, depending upon how many "elements" a line contains. Assuming that this is even the right way to approach this problem; I don't know of any other way. Hence, this post. =)
Here's the code h/we have come up with. Please contain the laughter, for now. 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $in = "/home/trix/test";
my $out = "/home/trix/out";
use vars qw(@array @list);
use vars qw ($host1 $host2 $conduit $permit $tcpudp $ip1
         $ip2 $eq $port $hitcnt $line);

open IN, "$in" || die "$!\n";
open OUT, ">$out" || die "$!\n";

while ($line = <IN>) {
    chomp $line;
    ($conduit, $permit, $tcpudp, $host1, $ip1, $eq, $port, $host2,$ip2
+, $hitcnt)=split( /\s/, $line);
    print OUT "$conduit $permit $tcpudp $host1\|$ip1\|$eq\|$port\|$hos
+t2\|$ip2\|$hitcnt\n";
}

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This prints: 
conduit permit tcp|host|192.168.1.1|eq|www|any|(hitcnt=57476)
conduit permit tcp|host|192.168.1.1|eq|139|host|192.168.2.1

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I thought that this was going to be a pretty easy thing to accomplish (for me), but I must say that I'm stumped. And it's not even my work! But I'm posting this, because I really want to learn how to do this. It seems like this could be pretty useful stuff.

Thanks,
Tuna

In reply to Variable number of words/fields in a line/record by Tuna

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